The populations of 61 countries are projected to decline by at least 1 percent between 2022 and 2050, and relatively low fertility rates will also combine with better health care to accelerate aging societies. As the figures were released in the UN’s World Population Prospects report, Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general, focused on the benefits of health care rather than declining fertility and hailed “advances in health that have extended life expectancy and dramatically reduced maternal and child mortality rates.” However, the growing proportion of elderly people in many countries is predicted to hurt economic growth and public finances and is already posing increasing policy challenges. Despite the slowdown in growth, the world’s population is still poised to hit the 8 billion mark this year, with India set to overtake China as the most populous country next year. The world’s population is expected to peak in the 2080s at 10.4 billion and then begin to decline – the first decline predicted in the UN’s annual report. Europe’s population shrank by 744,000 in 2020 and by 1.4 million last year — the biggest drop of any continent since records began in 1950, reflecting rising deaths, falling births and lower net migration linked to the pandemic. However, the pandemic is “not the main factor,” said John Wilmoth, director of the population division of the UN’s economic and social affairs department. The fertility rate “has been quite low in almost all European countries for many decades and that means there are not many young people,” he said. Europe’s population is expected to continue shrinking until 2100, with Germany and other countries joining a trend already established in Eastern and Southern European countries such as Poland and Italy.

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Two-thirds of the world’s citizens live in a country where the fertility rate is less than 2.1 births per woman, about the level needed to keep the population stable if death rates are low. In countries with declining populations “unless you get a productivity miracle, overall economic growth will fall,” said Charles Goodhart, emeritus professor at the London School of Economics and co-author of The Great Demographic Reversal. In Asia, Japan’s population has been shrinking since 2010, South Korea’s population fell in 2020, and China is projected to do the same this year. China’s population is projected to decline by about 6 million per year in the mid-2040s and by 12 million per year by the late 2050s—the world’s largest ever decline. “If you look at a map of the world of countries that are going to decline in population size, it basically starts in central Europe and goes east to Japan across Russia and China,” Wilmoth said.

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Africa overtook Asia in 2020 to become the main source of population growth. The UN says more than half of the projected increase to 2050 will be concentrated in just eight countries, mostly in Africa, with rapid growth threatening their development goals. By mid-century Nigeria is projected to be as densely populated as the US, closing the current gap of 121 million between the countries. More production “could and should” be moved to Africa, Goodhart said, “because the alternative, of mass migration to other countries where the population is declining, will not be politically viable.” “It is primarily the aging and shrinking of the working-age population that affects a country’s economic growth,” said Martina Lizarazo López at the Bertelsmann Stiftung, a Germany-based think tank. Increased productivity, automation and longer working lives can help reduce the effects of an aging population, experts said.

Globally, more than 1 billion people will be over 65 in 2030 with 210 million over 80, roughly double the number from 2010. Older people already represent about a quarter of the population in many countries, including Japan, Italy and of Germany. Joshua Wilde, a researcher at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, said that if fertility rates fell at a rate that the population fell, “it’s really great because you have a higher proportion of the population in working-age groups.” But “in the long run,” he pointed out, “all those workers who are driving per capita income are going to retire and need pensions, need health care.”